Kids at work

Every summer, vast numbers of parents are plunged into a childcare crisis - their kids are on holiday, and they're not. What a shame they can't take their children to the office ... well, would it really be so bad if they did? We decided to find out. Tim Dowling reports on the day when 17 children came in to work with their parents on G2. On the following pages, the adults and kids involved talk about how it went for them

A child playing during a conference in The Guardian's G2 offices. Photograph: Graham Turner

It seemed like a good idea at the time. As the school holidays commence, many working parents find themselves in a temporary childcare bind. Your children are on holiday, but you aren't. Wouldn't things be simpler if we could all just bring our kids into work? With everyone fretting so much about work-life balance, surely we should be thinking about ending the rigid separation between home and office. What's the worst that could happen? We decided to find out.

This did not, it must be said, seem like a good idea at the time to everyone. When the notion of bringing 17 children, ranging in age from two to 15, into the office from morning till deadline was first mooted, there was a distinct note of hostility from certain quarters. People without children have a work-life balance too, said one. "Why don't we all just bring our dining room tables in?" asked another. The parents, for the most part, found this attitude both surprising and distressing.

On the appointed day things begin well, despite the fact that the first use of the F-word in front of impressionable toddlers comes exactly three minutes in, and is followed by a fairly comprehensive demonstration of its conjugation. More colleagues and kids drift in over the next half hour. The children are shy at first, but genuinely curious about their parents' place of employment. "They really want to know what's so important that I can't pick them up from school on Mondays and Tuesdays," says a co-worker.

During the morning production meeting two kids play quietly on the floor in the middle. Three teens listen in respectful, if slightly bored, silence. A couple of children are actually taking notes. If this sounds like the best one could possibly hope for, it was also about as good as it got.

A small side office has been set up with Play-Doh and drawing stuff, but it cannot compete with the sheer unfamiliarity of the surroundings. All the water coolers are instantly emptied. Several disposable cameras are used up in a barrage of flashes. Many office chairs are swivelled. Fairly early on my son Will, 7, decides to put himself in contention for the title of Child Most Likely to Ensure That This Experiment Is Not an Unqualified Success. He finds a box containing a pair of Moon Shoes - "mini-sized trampolines for your feet" - straps them on and bounces around the room, falling over and smashing into furniture. Distracting, yes, but all in all probably worse for the people working on the floor below. He gets bored with the Moon Shoes after a while, but they are thereafter in constant use by one child or another.

The parents, or at least those who are allowed access to their computers, have relatively little trouble concentrating amid the rising chaos, but in the less child-friendly districts there is a palpable sense of annoyance. A little gang of kids have begun a game of football using a large inflatable orange ball, which keeps landing on people's desks. I'm trying to write, but I'm dimly aware that I should also be attempting to exert some discipline.

An eerie calm ensues, during which many important phone calls are quickly placed, but for parents any prolonged silence contains a crackle of suspicion. What are they up to? There is a boy lying on the floor at my feet, talking into a mobile. "I don't know," he says wearily. "It's full of computers." A colleague walks by and mentions that three children are creating havoc by playing football in the men's toilets. "One of them is yours," he says.

I walk down to the Gents and order them out. "But my Dad said we're allowed to!" shouts one of them. I drag them all back to the office, to the delight of no one.

The office gets brief respite with the arrival of Kay and his trolley of drinks and sweets. He keeps all 17 children entertained for a whole 20 minutes. After he leaves the volume really begins to rise: laughing, crying, shrieking, pleading. "It's a real pain in the arse," says a male - and yes, childless - colleague, complaining that he can't hear anyone on the phone.

"I love it!" says another sarcastically. "The energy!" But the veneer of good humour is already wearing thin. I suggest they might not be entering into the spirits of things. "We have entered into the spirit of it!" says one. "We haven't hit anyone!" While some of the non-parents were clearly delighted with the experiment so far, the noise level took its toll on everyone.

Another colleague points out, however, that it is not the noise, but the library-like silence of the workplace which is new. "Newspaper offices used to be like The Front Page," she says. "Phones rang, everyone hammered away at typewriters. If you wanted to talk to someone across the room, you shouted over to them."

The football game starts up again. A potted plant falls over. The children, oblivious to the fact that certain staffers are less than charmed by their antics, chase each other around the arts desk. Across the room the teens are beginning to turn their eyes skyward. The football kids start chanting: "Let's go to the toilets! Let's go to the toilets!" It is half-past eleven.

By lunchtime a lot of the parents have started to crack. There have been a few tantrums, one aborted nap and some futile attempts to rein in the little gang of three that is responsible for most of the mayhem. The children are taken off to a local park for a picnic. I ask someone if she has ever taken her children to work before. "Never," she says. A male colleague with a fouryear- old daughter says he's only done it once before, "for about two hours at Christmas", and if the situation arose again he would take time off work before he would do it again. "It wouldn't be fair on her."

Most of the children, it has to be said, are having a whale of a time. They have realised the extent to which high spirits will be tolerated in the name of the experiment, and they're pushing the envelope.

For the first half hour after lunch, things settle into a kind of equilibrium. The children are chatting, drawing, playing boards games, watching DVDs and sending emails. Parents and nonparents are getting on with work in a perfectly unharried fashion. A stranger who walked into the office during this brief lull could be forgiven for imagining that it was like this all the time at G2, that our work-life balance was not a matter of competing priorities, but a perfect, seamless weave of parenting, productivity and glitter.

This is before they start racing office chairs down an inclined corridor. Faced with a looming deadline, most of the parents do what they do when they work from home: tune everything out and assess the damage later. By late afternoon a few of them have executed contingency arrangements to send their kids home early, but many of the children are now insisting on staying in what has become, for them at least, a pleasantly out-of-control environment. I have no options, so I just stare at the computer screen for a bit. My son Johnnie, eight, comes up and prods me.

"Dad. Move, Dad." I look at him blankly. He leans in close. "MOVE!"

I get up and wander over to another dad and ask how it's been for him. "It didn't go as badly as I imagined," he says, as if it were somehow over already. "I suppose as a parent you get used to living with chaos all around you." But not in public. Does he feel as self-conscious as I do about all the disruption we have visited upon the office? "Not at all," he says, smiling. "At the end of the day they're only kids." Behind us a girl turns to her father and says: "Dad, do you do anything? Because you haven't really done anything all day." Down the corridor the racing chairs knock over two fire extinguishers. The culprits leg it to the toilets and hide.

The return of Kay, king of the trolley, provides a timely distraction. "OK," he says to the kids, "let's do business." My children rifle my pockets for notes. When Kay leaves, a few of them try to follow him to the next floor. By this time the cries of "Can we go now?" have become more frequent, and more insistent. Most of the parents look as if they have lived two days in one go.

In the end, of course, the deadline was met, and the last child standing was there long after the first grown-up had gone home for the day. With 24 hours of hindsight, everybody regained their composure. Some of the dissenting nonparents chose to recast their resentment as so much play-acting. Most decided it had been nowhere as awful as they'd initially feared. The parents were left feeling they had exorcised a certain amount of self-consciousness, and perhaps a bit of their natural smugness with it. The children all ended the day on a high note (except for mine; I shouted at them for fighting on the bus) and everyone agreed that this bold experiment in work-life co-mingling had been such a grand success that it will never need to be repeated ever, ever again.